I Fucking Hate Europe
What courage the electronic moon contains--
that crazy plank, that escort of the black hippocampus.
When all her fresh Julys creep up,
her ultramarine sky or ardent encounters
make me tremble, make me sense that this is all
cinematography, a rut composed of epic storms
a rut of blue that will not move not even for eternity.
Fuck. I fucking hate Europe! I fucking hate the ancient!
Felix, now that I have seen crescent-fanged archipelagos,
now that I have seen delirious skies, not as you believe ( in dreams),
but in REAL LIFE which is not over there, not in some voyage
but rather right here in this night made of the endlessness of exile,
right here with her one million birds, I can easily say,
“Oh future, there is no vigor.”
Translator's Note:
My Baudelaire “translations” are a result of trying to enter the queer imaginative space between the literal meaning of the French words and the imagined meaning of the patterns of sound and building a new language world based in this murky area. I spontaneously invented the character “Felix” as one who functions almost like a guide through this unchartered territory, a guide to understanding this unstable setting, these moments of language and feeling, the wavering life-force that exists between a dream and the sun.
